Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

2. Marie de Botidoux, one of Patsy’s best French friends, draws Sally Hemings into the corridor outside the upstairs parlor. “You must be honest with me, dear Sally,” she says in French. “Is it true that there are slaves in Virginia?”

Sally Hemings, seeing no reason to deny the obvious, answers in the affirmative.

“I knew it!” Marie replies. “I have inquired of your mistress a thousand times on this point, and she would never tell me the truth.”

Sally Hemings is suddenly possessed by cold dread.

“And now I need you to be completely honest with me on one other point,” Marie says. “Is Monsieur Jimmy your brother?”

Sally Hemings hesitates, but again she answers in the affirmative.

“If that is true, then you must be a Negress.”

Sally Hemings flushes. Her mouth falls open, but she doesn’t speak.

“Of course you are! One can see it in your lips! You are a white Negress! Who has ever heard of such a thing! A white Negress! But if you are a Negress, then you must also be a slave, is that not true?”

Sally Hemings answers that she is as free as anyone else in France.

3. Renaud is sixteen, one year older than Sally Hemings. He has a dimple in the middle of his chin, a fog of rust-colored freckles across his nose and cheeks, and he always seems to be thinking of something funny. She asks him why he wears his blue knitted cap tilted to the left, and he tells her it is to hide his donkey ear. Another time she spots a dead rat in the gutter, and he says, “Shhh! That’s my brother Fernand. He’s sleeping.” Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, shortly after nine in the morning, she hears the jingly clink of his milk barrow coming down rue Neuve-de-Berri and is always ready in the doorway with a pewter flagon when he reaches the Hôtel de Langeac, and he always greets her with a merry, “Good morning, Mademoiselle Salée!” ( “ Miss Salty ” )

Renaud’s lips are raspberry red and are often chapped. One Wednesday, Sally Hemings finds herself wondering what it would be like to kiss those cracked and flaky lips, and she is unable to stop looking at them the entire time he is ladling milk out of the ceramic pot in his barrow. It is the same when he comes again on Friday, but this time as she watches his lips pucker and stretch to form words or press together crookedly while he tilts the ladle over her flagon, a warm urgency radiates from deep within her belly all the way into her throat, and she wishes he would pull her toward him and press his lips against hers. She has never felt like this about a boy before, and she cannot tell if it is a very good or a very bad thing.

When he comes again on Monday, the warm urgency is so powerful that she can hardly put one word coherently after the other. When she inadvertently speaks in English, she breaks off in the middle of her sentence and, after a moment of silence, says in French, “I’m looking for my French, but I’ve lost it.”

He laughs as if she’s made a joke. “I saw it a few minutes ago running down the rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré. If it’s still there when I am done with your neighbors, I’ll grab it by the ear and bring it back to you.”

Renaud smiles at her merrily, picks up the handles to his barrow and sets off down the muddy street, his ladle jingling against the side of the crock.

The next time he comes, she notices a limp white tulip lying in the barrow, just in front of the crock. He picks it up and holds it out to her. When it flops over the edge of his hand, he grips the the base of the stem in one hand and then makes a whistley zip as he slides the thumb and index finger of his other hand from the base all the way to the flower. Then he holds the flower erect as he hands it to her. “I couldn’t find your French,” he says, “so I thought I’d bring you this.”

Sally Hemings is smiling so hard as she accepts the flower that she worries she might burst into tears. A long moment passes before she can thank him. “It’s so beautiful!” she says.

“It used to be more beautiful. But I think it’s a little thirsty.”

Then they are both silent. Renaud is smiling, but for the first time ever he seems to be uneasy. Sally Hemings wonders if she shouldn’t thank him with a kiss. Perhaps that is what he expects. In her mind’s eye, she sees herself getting up on the tips of her toes and pressing her lips against his. That hot urgency has become so powerful it is like a magnetic force drawing her toward him. But she doesn’t budge. She is too afraid.

“I almost forgot!” he says. “I have cheese!” He pulls a board draped with cloth from behind the crock. “My grandfather made it.” He pulls off the cloth with the finesse of a magician. “A Camembert!” The white wheel is about a foot wide. A third of it has already been cut away, and the yellow cheese is oozing onto the greasy wood. “You have never tasted a better cheese.”

“It looks delicious,” she says, though she doesn’t actually like French cheese.

“How much do you want?”

“Let me go ask my brother.”

“Your brother?” Renaud looks perplexed.

“He is the chef.”

“No!” Renaud laughs derisively. “The chef is not your brother!”

“He is,” she insists — but then she realizes what is happening.

“Monsieur Hemings?”

“Yes,” she says weakly.

“How can that be? He is black!”

She gives her shoulders a helpless shrug. “He is my brother.”

“Then you are black, too.”

She doesn’t answer.

He laughs incredulously. “Are you a cannibal?”

“No!” She does not understand how Renaud could say such a thing. “Of course not!”

“I thought all blacks were cannibals! I thought there was nothing you liked more than a plump little baby for breakfast!” He seems to think his joke is very funny. “From now on I will have to call you Miss Pepper!”

She asks for the milk.

The next time he comes, she puts her flagon on the doorstep with a single sol even before she hears the jingling clink from the end of the street. And when the sound has receded in the opposite direction, she opens the door and picks up the full flagon. The money is gone.

Time passes. Sally Hemings is fifteen. She is sixteen. The food prepared by Jimmy agrees with her. She grows three and a half inches and becomes almost as tall as Patsy, at whose height everyone exclaims. Her once node-knuckled fingers grow pleasantly plump, the hollows around her eyes fill in and there is a pinkish light in her cheeks that Thomas Jefferson associates with mornings in early spring, just after the leaves have come in.

He often thinks of his wife when he looks at her. Her eyes are exactly the zinc gray of Martha’s, and her hair is the same coffee brown. She is much taller than Martha, however; her cheekbones are higher, and her jaw is more delicate and tapered. But it is less the way she appears that reminds him of his wife than how she sounds and moves. Most striking is the way, when she is between activities or when she thinks no one is looking, her expression will go inert, as if she has just received terrible news. When he was first courting Martha, this expression would make him worry that he had somehow offended her, but in the next instant she would smile or even laugh. And it is exactly the same with Sally Hemings. She has what people call “laughing eyes.” When she smiles, they narrow with delight and seem themselves to be smiling. And her laugh, like Martha’s, starts with a hoot, then tumbles into a low, merry gurgle. Every time Thomas Jefferson hears it, he cannot help but smile himself. Sometimes he, too, laughs.

Thomas Jefferson is returning to his study from the kitchen, his cheek bulging with a ripped-off piece of bread that he is rather awkwardly trying to make swallowable without having to remove it from his mouth. On Saturdays, Jimmy always has a lavish dinner waiting for Patsy and Polly when they get home from school — but it is two o’clock; they are almost an hour late, and Thomas Jefferson simply has to put something into his stomach.